GreenHopper Quick Filter Semantics...

[Kelly Arrey]

Quick filters are a great feature of GH ! Thanks !

What are the semantics of a quick filter ? Does clicking on a quick filter mean "show me this", or "hide everything that's not this" ?

Suppose a typical user had a quick filter for "Issues assigned to Sam" and another one for "Issues assigned to Bill". Suppose that they clicked on both filters - what would they expect to see ? Would they expect to see all issues assigned to either Sam or Bill ? Today, they'd see no issues - the jql snippets from the separate quick filters are ANDed together. So the implementation fulfills the semantics "hide everything that's not this", which is subtly different from "show me this".

If the JQL snippets were instead ORed together, would that be more intuitive ? Would that implement the semantics "show me this" ? Clicking two filters would "show me this and that".

I can create filters with the semantics "hide this", which, when ANDed together, allow me to combine filters as follows:

• create quick filters of the form "Hide Sam" with JQL "assignee != Sam".
• if I hide Ted, Bob and Dan's issues, I can see both Sam and Bill's
• instead of toggling on the filters I want to see, I toggle all the filters on, hiding everything, and then toggle off the filters for the things I want to see.
• this does the job, but seems awfully cumbersome and more difficult to explain to others than it, arguably, needs to be

Thoughts ? Thanks.

[Kelly Arrey · Accepted solution]

This issue was reported as improvement request GHS-8975, and resolved as "not planned at this time".

[Wouter Franssens]

Hello,

I agreed with Kelly. It would greatly enhance the use of quick filters if there would be a way to choose between AND or OR quick filters together: AND creates a subset of the subset of issues defined by the Kanban board. OR would create a different subset.

Thanks

[boardtc]

The quick filter does what it says on the tin, it filters out what is in the filter, so if you create a quick filter called "hide done issues" the JQL would need to be

status != closed

You could have named the filter as show done issues but then it would be named incorrectly as that is not what it would do.

[Kelly Arrey]

Tom, thanks for your answer. My apologies, I haven't explained myself well. The point I was trying to make is that combining filters is not necessarily intuitive - if you turn on both a "Show Dan's Issues" filter and a "Show Bill's Issues" filter, would you expect to see both Dan's and Bill's issues ? Thanks.

[boardtc]

It can be strange initially alright, but myabe this explanation can help you: when the first filter, "Show Dan's Issues", is turned on, lets's say that shows 20 issues. If a 2nd filter is now applied, "Show Bill's Issues", that filter is applied to what's currently showing, which is the 20 issues. So in this case since an issue can't have multiple assignees, you will see no issues.

Turning off the "Show Dan's Issues" filter and you will see your unfilters project again and then you can apply the "Show Bill's Issues" filter.

[Mattias Hallqvist]

For my part, I'd say 90% of the time I only want to see one active filter at a time, and therefore it's quite tedious always having to deactivate the active filter.

A solution to this other then a OR option would be to be able to set quick filters to act as radio buttons.
That way the filter I click on will be the only active one.

So the ultimate solution would be to be able to set up groups of filters acting as radio buttons, AND having the option to set if a filter is merged using AND or OR.

[Joanna Waligora]

Echoing the "Let's have an AND/OR toggle for Quick Filters" idea!

[Lisa Forstberg]

I agree with Kelly, it would be great use to be able to pick and choose between the quick filters, ie enhance it with an OR mode in the quick filters.